Innovation in tourism has taken center stage in a context marked by increasingly demanding technological, environmental, and competitive changes. More than just a driver of modernization, it has become an essential prerequisite for improving the quality of tourism offerings, accelerating business adaptation, fostering new products, services, and business models, and strengthening the sector’s resilience and sustainability. In Portugal, this evolution takes on particular relevance in a context where tourism consumption accounted for 16.6% of GDP in 2024.
It was within this context that innovation began to take on a more structured role in tourism policy. Tourism 4.0 played a key role in kickstarting this process by aligning the sector with the agenda of digital transformation, entrepreneurship, and experimentation, laying the groundwork for more sustained action, driven by Turismo de Portugal, and for the development of tools specifically tailored to the tourism ecosystem.
Among these tools, FIT – Fostering Innovation in Tourism has established itself as the primary mechanism for stimulating innovation in the sector. Launched in 2016, the program was designed to support initiatives in ideation, acceleration, and open innovation, involving incubators, startups, entrepreneurs, academia, companies, and other partners in the development of solutions aligned with the concrete needs of the tourism industry. Throughout its editions, FIT has contributed to consolidating a nationwide collaborative network and to sustaining projects focused on emerging challenges in the sector.
At the same time, a more cohesive ecosystem has emerged around this agenda. NEST – Tourism Innovation Center has come to play a key role in bringing together businesses, knowledge, technology, and experimentation, while the creation of CIBT has reinforced this trajectory through an infrastructure dedicated to incubating and developing technology-based solutions related to tourism.
Together, these instruments reflect the shift from a more ad hoc approach to modernization toward a more structured approach to innovation in tourism, based on creating conditions to test solutions, mobilize talent, bring businesses and knowledge together, and accelerate the sector’s response to emerging challenges.
